Smart Money Daily – Site Recap & Stats Galore

A few things happened in the past day or two that got me thinking that it was time for a recap post. The idea for this site began exactly 6 months ago when I picked up a copy of Fortune magazine and read the story of how people were making money online from Google ads. The story featured a Jon Gales and his MobileTracker.net site…well today I got blogged by Jon on his personal site. That’s a cool milestone![Is it just me or are half the people in theÂ blogosphere named 'Jon' - I'm considering changing to 'John' to be more unique!]

On May 30, I crossed the magic $100 threshold [then they have to pay you] for AdSense earnings. Today I noticed this in my bank statement:

Sorry for the blur but it’s against their rules to divulge details of earnings, needless to say, just over $100.

Overall the site has grown nicely. Considering that I put a lot of effort into writing the scripts to power the site, now that is is fairly stable I am able to create content at a much greater pace. Here’s some stats:

I changed servers in April so I only have three months [keep in mind that these are raw and contain search engine spiders & me, which accounts for a lot of visits]. My biggest accidental coup has been my ranking for the term “smart money” on MSNÂ - number 2 at the time I am posting this. Nowhere to be found in the top 1000 on Google for the same term. How did I do it? Not sure, but I sure get a lot of traffic from that one. 43% of all the traffic that comes from search engines comes from that term on MSN. MSN’s algorithm must be heavily weighted towards a match on the domain name.

I have ~85 stories written and that translates into about 200 pages indexed in each of the major search engines. The biggest mistake that I made with this site has been to be too broadly focused; I decided to follow my personality rather that laser-niche myself into boredom.

RSS stats continue to rise as well. Here the feedburner graph – wish I owned a couple stocks with charts like this:

Overall, it has been wonderful and I have learned a lot! The biggest thing that I have learned [and that I love] about the blogosphere is that generosity pays! It seems like the more you send traffic to other people’s sites, the more people visit your site.

Thanks to everyone who’s been reading, you have inspired me with the visits, comments, emails and clicks. My goal is to replace myÂ income by September 2006 [when my contract expires] so I’ll keep you up to date onÂ my progress.